Mostly, I blog. I blog here, I blog about American politics for The Economist, and I blog about miscellaneous other stuff at my personal blog, The Fly Bottle. My non-blog writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, The Boston Review, Reason, Forbes, Slate, Prospect, The Daily and a variety of other publications online and off. I've been a columnist for The Week, a commentator for Marketplace on public radio, and a regular on Bloggingheads TV. Before going solo, I was a research fellow at the Cato Institute, where I wrote very long papers about Social Security, the policy implications of happiness research, and economic inequality. My interest in issues at the intersection of psychology, economics, and politics goes back to my grad studies in philosophy of mind and political philosophy. I live in Iowa City, Iowa with my fiancée and a viszla, Winston.

4/19/2011 @ 10:05PM13,048 views

Educated Women and "Marrying Down"

Kay Hymowitz notes that this year, 57% of all college grads will be women, which leads her to ponder:

So here’s a question: when the time comes, will these women be willing to marry “down”? Don’t bet on it.

It’s not entirely clear to me why Hymowitz asks this question, but I guess I get the gist of it. So, back when the typical woman had fewer years of college education than the typical man, and women had fewer and worse job opportunities, the typical marriage involved women marrying “up” educationally and socioeconomically. As women’s equality advanced, both altering the economic structure of the household and making it easier to pair off with an opposite-sex peer, it has become more common for like to marry like. And, now, more women than men are graduating college. It stands to reason that some of them are going to have to marry men who don’t graduate college.

My question is: in what sense does this count as marrying “down”? Back in the Mad Men era, a bright college-educated young man who married a sharp non-college-educated young woman of his general social class wasn’t marrying “down”. So why would it count as marrying “down” today if a young woman with a freshly-minted degree in elementary ed from Local U (2.6 GPA!) marries an enterprising chap who dropped out of Regional State after his sophomore year to run a thriving cell-phone kiosk in the mall? Answer: it wouldn’t!

Anyway, let’s talk about this:

[T]he biggest reason we probably won’t see a lot more college-educated women walking down the aisle with their plumber is one we don’t like to say out loud: they want to have smart kids. Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State.

Ridiculous… and personal!

Look, the desire for smart kids is not why most smart women don’t want to get hitched to less smart men. It’s because most women (and, as the old sexual division of labor become increasingly obsolete, most men) don’t want a lifetime with someone who doesn’t understand them, who doesn’t “get” their interests and enthusiasms, who thinks they’re “weird.” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are right that our grandparents’ marriages were largely about shared production, but contemporary marriage is largely about shared consumption. If he’s bully for Bay and she’s mad about Malick, it’s probably not going to work out. If your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean, then chances are so are your best friends’–including your romantic partner’s. We like people who are like us. Wild! I bet even gay people, who aren’t out to merge genomes, prefer partners of similar intelligence, physical attractiveness, with similar interests, and the like. You think?

Sometimes it even happens (and I have solid empirical evidence to this effect) that Ms. Georgetown will accept a proposal for Mr. Northern Iowa. Seriously, if Mr. Florida State has gotten so far with Ms. Harvard that a proposal makes sense, he probably stands a fair chance. As Matt Yglesias correctly observes, college quality may be a decent proxy for intelligence, but fellas who graduate from colleges with superior football teams, or who don’t graduate college at all, can nevertheless signal their mental mettle by, say, talking. It works. Believe me.

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